In the 23rd minute of if Albanian Tragedy struck the Superliga game between FC Egnatia and Partizani. Raphael Dwamena collapsed on the pitch and died on Saturday.
The former Red Bull Salzburg academy player, who won nine caps for Ghana between 2017 and 2018, was carried off the field and despite efforts to revive him, was later pronounced dead.
The talented striker’s career was blighted by his heart problems and despite calls for him to retire early, Dwamena was unable to walk away from the game he loved.
Dwamena’s amateur career began at Red Bull Ghana before moving to Austria to play for Salzburg. But it was at Austria Lustenau and then FC Zürich where Dwamena announced himself as a top striker, scoring 21 goals in 51 games in the only season he played for the latter in 2017-18.
Zurich were among his former clubs to pay tribute to the injured forward on social media.
History of heart problems
Dwamena’s career has been held back by a heart condition first diagnosed in 2017. That year, an €11.4m move to Premier League side Brighton failed when he failed a medical based on his heart problems.
In 2020, while at Spanish club Levante, he was fitted with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), the type Christian Eriksen after his cardiac arrest on the field in 2021 and it has been placed on other players with heart conditions.
The ICD allowed Levante club doctors to monitor his heart during matches. in October 2020, following a move to Danish side Vejle Boldklub, he was unable to take the field after his ICD showed values that were considered too high.
A year later, in October 2021, Dwamena was back in Austria playing for Blau-Weiss Linz when he collapsed on the pitch during a game. His ICD shocked him back to life, but the game was abandoned and his Austrian career was over.
Dwamena ignored calls to retire
There have been repeated calls for Dwamena to retire from football, including respected Ghanaian doctor Prince Pambo, who in November 2021, shortly after Dwamena collapsed in Austria, called on the striker to consider spending time on his career.
“If Dwamena was my patient, I’d sit him down and take him off for a year or two,” Pambo said in November 2021. “To get to the bottom of whatever problem he’s in, I’d probably be inclined to want to prep him well done for a beautiful retirement from sport.”
Speaking only in a personal capacity, Pambo continued: “I think whenever these things happen, a bold decision has to be made. And I would like to prepare my patient to have a clean and very good exit point and see how he can use the experience he got from football to help the industry, possibly from a technical or managerial point of view.”
Dwamena did not heed the pleas and, in 2023, turned to Albanian Superliga club FK Egnatia to restart his struggling career. Things had soared for the talented striker, who had scored 20 times in 28 games, catapulting his side to the top of the table.
But on Saturday, November 11, midway through the first half of a match between Albania’s top two teams, Dwamena collapsed and died, his ICD unable to save him this time.
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